


Throw The Torch

by Miko



Series: We Shall Keep The Faith [11]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Love Triangles, Past Brainwashing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 06:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3967282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miko/pseuds/Miko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a month with Steve and the others, Bucky is finally starting to feel like a human being again. But he hasn't found all the surprises in his head just yet...</p><p> </p><p>This fic should be read in sequence with the rest of the series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Throw The Torch

The quarters assigned to him were nice enough, but Bucky couldn’t stop feeling like he was living in a very luxurious cage. He knew the exact dimensions of every room, measured in strides, and he could pace the area with his eyes closed and never so much as nudge a wall or piece of furniture.

He’d been at the Avengers base for a little more than a month. Thankfully Wanda had been right about their sessions getting easier over time, and he could now go nearly a week before he found himself struggling too much against his conditioning and needed her help again.

Unless something triggered him, first. He had bad days, and he had worse days, and on the worse days almost anything could set him off. Last week he’d done too good a job of hiding how close to the edge he was; Romanoff had made a teasing comment about stealing Peggy from him for a while, and Steve had been forced to physically pry Bucky off her to stop him from hurting her badly.

At least Peggy could always calm him out of a rage, with her touch and her voice. She was never too far from his side for that reason, though he’d insisted on having his own rooms so he had somewhere he could retreat to when everything just got too _overwhelming_. Which still happened on a distressingly regular basis.

Also, he didn’t want her to feel like she had to be completely tied to him. _Peggy_ didn’t have any trouble with crowds of people, and she’d made friends among the Avengers and base personnel. He wanted her to be able to spend time with them, to eat in the canteen or watch movies in someone’s quarters or have another lesson to catch up on the modern age.

So Bucky told her that he needed the occasional hours of solitude, and pretended not to notice her relief. He knew it wasn’t that she regretted her commitment to him. He just wanted her to continue not to regret it, and that meant he had to give her space no matter how much it killed him to let her out of his sight. 

But it did leave him with too much time spent on his own, pacing around in his rooms, unable to sit or sleep or do anything restful because of the demons in his head.

The door chimed, and Bucky tried not to be too obviously grateful for the interruption of his brooding. “Yeah?”

When it slid open, he wasn’t surprised to see Steve on the other side. His friend spent as much time with him as Bucky would let him, but on the bad days it still hurt to look at him. On the worse days, his presence could potentially be enough to set Bucky off.

Today was only marginally a bad day, though, and the minor headache he got at the sight of the other man wasn’t nearly enough to make Bucky send him away. “C’mon in,” he invited, knowing Steve was waiting for the result of his internal evaluation. They’d learned the hard way not to let him get too close until Bucky was sure he could handle it.

“Hey,” Steve greeted him with a big smile as he approached. He paused as he entered the living area, the smile disappearing as he frowned at the carpet, and Bucky glanced down as well.

There wasn’t a track worn into it, exactly, but there were definitely signs of his repeated footsteps around the edges of the room. Bucky flushed, embarrassed by the evidence of his restlessness. He tried as hard as he could to act normal around the others, not wanting them to worry about him, but it _was_ still an act most of the time.

Sure enough, Steve was now looking at him like he blamed himself for Bucky’s inability to sit still. “You know you’re not a prisoner in here, right? You don’t need one of us to let you out, Buck. If you’re bored, you can go somewhere else.”

“Go where?” Bucky countered, shrugging. “I still make most of the base nervous just by being around. There’s no more for me to do out there than there is in here, so I might as well let everyone do their jobs without looking over their shoulders for me.”

“They’ll only stop being nervous if they have a chance to get used to you,” Steve replied. “Anyway it’s not as bad as you’re thinking, at this point. You haven’t killed anyone yet, so most of them are pretty convinced you’re not going to.”

He smiled again, to show he was joking. Bucky appreciated that, because sarcasm and deadpan humour escaped him a lot of the time. It was so fucking frustrating, knowing there were social cues he ought to be catching, cues he once would have been able to read with ease but which now meant nothing to him.

Peggy and Steve and Romanoff were all learning how to handle him pretty well, picking up on _his_ cues so they knew when to prompt him about something or back off and give him space. He hated that he needed to be handled, even as he was grateful they were bothering to make the effort. Wanda kept promising him it would continue to get better, and he knew he’d come a long way already, but that didn’t stop it from being aggravating in the meantime.

“Anyway, I stopped by to see if you wanted to hit the gym with me,” Steve said. “I figured you could probably use some exercise, I just didn’t realize how much you needed it. We could go a few rounds?”

The thought was incredibly tempting, but Bucky hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he admitted. “My control’s still not that great. I could hurt you if I go lethal and you don’t realize it fast enough.”

“So how about we fight beside each other, not against each other?” Steve’s smile widened to a grin. “Stark built us a Hell of a virtual training room. I don’t really understand how it all works - holographs and robots and I kinda tuned out after that because none of the explanation meant anything to me. But it works. We can set the threat level easy to start, see how you handle it.”

“Now _that_ sounds like the best fucking idea I’ve heard all day,” Bucky said, sighing with relief at the idea of getting out of the damned room. “Let me get changed.”

Steve waited for him, and they left Bucky’s quarters together to head down the hall. “There’s no reason you can’t use the training room any time it’s not busy,” Steve told him. “I’ll authorize the computer to let you in and make changes to the programs, you can design your own workouts and never have to worry about hurting anyone.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said, the word quiet but heartfelt. He knew Steve and the others were trying hard to accommodate him, but the more he could do on his own, the less he’d have to resent needing them so much. And it would be damned good to have somewhere he could go to work himself to exhaustion in the middle of the night when Peggy was sleeping but his nightmares wouldn’t allow him to join her.

Glancing sideways at Steve, Bucky thought maybe his friend understood all too well why he’d need something like that. He remembered the nightmares Steve got sometimes during the war. They surely hadn’t gotten any better in the meantime, not when he had so many _more_ people to feel responsible for now.

The base was huge, and the Avengers were only a tiny part of what went on here. They were the point group, the ones everyone was looking at, but there were plenty of other strike and tactical teams operating out of this facility and Steve was in charge of all of them. Not to mention all the support staff, many of whom were only technically not civilians.

“You just can’t help yourself, can you,” Bucky asked, the words escaping him before he realized he meant to say them.

Steve blinked at him, confused. “Sorry?”

Deciding to run with it, Bucky shrugged. “This place. All these people. You’ve just gotta have a team, and I bet you didn’t even try.”

That made Steve laugh. “Well, I can’t do everything myself, you know. It helps to have backup.”

“You never were any good at following orders you didn’t agree with, so I guess they had to either put you in charge or get rid of you.” Bucky looked out over the compound - they were crossing a raised walkway, and he could see quite a bit of the activity on the ground floor. “You planning to add me to your roster again?”

It was a question that had been nagging at him for a while now. What the Hell was he going to do with himself? On the really bad days he still half suspected they were just brainwashing him in a nicer way, making him into a weapon for their use instead of HYDRA’s. But the rest of the time he knew that wasn’t true. Still, he couldn’t just hang around here forever, leeching off Steve.

He’d go crazy from boredom, for one thing.

Steve was looking at him like he was trying to evaluate what answer would cause the least bad reaction. “If that’s what _you_ want, when you’re ready... Hell, Bucky, you should know there’s nobody I’d rather have at my side. Or at my back, for that matter.”

The words made him flush, and Bucky felt the warmth of it flow all through him. Pleasure, it was pleasure. The thought that Steve still valued him that much made him feel pleased.

There was just one problem with that scenario. Well, one problem out of many, but it was probably the biggest obstacle. “You really think your team could accept me, trust me, after everything I’ve done?”

To his surprise, Steve laughed. “I’m pretty sure Natasha’s kill count leaves yours in the dust - especially when you consider all your targets were political or strategic, and a lot of hers before SHIELD were innocent civilians. Not to mention Wanda became Enhanced because HYDRA was experimenting on her to create a weapon, and she was an enemy the first time Nat and I faced her. So, yeah. I think you’ll fit right in.”

Bucky felt his eyes go wide as he stared at his friend, and pondered that. He’d known somewhere in the back of his head that Romanoff had been an enemy agent at one point, and she’d switched sides to join SHIELD, but he hadn’t really thought about what that might mean. And now that Steve said it so bluntly, he realized he’d known or suspected that Wanda had, like him, been a creation of HYDRA, but he hadn’t thought about what _that_ meant, either.

Maybe, just maybe, he really could be a part of Steve’s team again. Be part of a group where he belonged, where he _chose_ to belong, and could start to make up for all the shit he’d done. He wasn’t much of a team player, anymore, but maybe he could relearn the skill. Or at least find his own way to contribute.

Steve was looking back at him with an expression of sympathetic understanding. “When you’re ready, and if you want,” he repeated, clapping Bucky on the shoulder. “If not, we’ll find you something else, I promise. I’m not going to leave you hanging around forever, Bucky. I’m just waiting for you to feel ready and up to it.”

It was hard to believe that they would let him walk away if he chose to, when he could be such a valuable asset to the team. At the same time, it wasn’t hard for Bucky to believe it at all, because Steve would never force him or hold him prisoner.

“No, I think... I’d like that,” he admitted gruffly. “Working with you again. You’re still too fucking stubborn to know when to quit.”

“Damned straight,” Steve replied, grinning again. “Any time you feel up to it, you can join in on the team training sessions. With Maximoff there I don’t think you’d have to worry too much about getting triggered and hurting someone. She’d spot it happening, and she can contain you no problem.”

“Yeah. That sounds really good.” And it did, wow did it ever. Bucky hadn’t realized how much of a difference it would make to him to have a purpose and a direction again. It felt like a weight had been lifted off him. He’d been drifting, at a loss, since he’d pulled Steve out of the river and left HYDRA behind. His only goal had been to avoid recapture, but that wasn’t working towards something, it was just running.

Steve stopped at a particular door and put his hand over a plate on the wall, then typed a few commands into the display and gestured for Bucky to let it scan his hand as well. “All right, you’ve got full access,” Steve told him when the computer beeped to indicate the scan was finished. “You can set it up for hand to hand, target practice, or a mixture of both. You have to use the guns that are designed to work in there, so if you want to do training with real rifles you’ll have to use the shooting range, but you don’t have to worry about hearing protection or spent casings or running out of ammo in here.”

Opening the door, Steve gestured him inside, and Bucky stepped forward to find himself on a catwalk overlooking a large room that was at least three stories high. There was a staircase to the left to allow access to the bottom level. At the moment it was set up like a training dojo, with targets and practice dummies around the edge and a cleared space in the middle. And it was occupied.

Peggy and Romanoff were down there, and they’d been at it a while judging by the sweat glistening on their exposed skin. Romanoff was running Peggy through an exercise that was part kata, part sparring, and it looked like his girl had been studying the new styles of martial arts pretty intensely because she wasn’t half bad. Bucky approved. Peggy had always been one tough dame, but the more she learned to protect herself, the less he had to worry about her.

“Hot damn,” Bucky breathed out, watching the two women below. Steve made a questioning noise, and Bucky hushed him quickly, not wanting the girls to hear and stop what they were doing. 

God but he really _loved_ modern fashions. The pants and tops both were wearing were tight enough to look painted on and moved with their bodies like a second skin. Peggy wasn’t as toned as Romanoff, but she’d put most women to shame and he liked the sleek lines of her body. 

Not that Romanoff didn’t look damned good, too. She had Peggy in a lock now, both of Peggy’s arms trapped from behind, and the two women were pressed together tightly as Peggy squirmed to get free.

From the corner of his eyes Bucky saw Steve had stepped up to the rail as well, and the look on his friend’s face was just as blatantly appreciative of the view as Bucky felt. “I could watch that all day,” Steve murmured, and he sounded reverent. “We did good, pal. Real good.”

“We sure as Hell did,” Bucky agreed. Two of the most amazing women in the world were down there, and they’d chosen Bucky and Steve as their partners. That was a fucking life accomplishment right there.

Peggy got free and even managed to turn Romanoff’s hold into a flip that should have thrown the other woman onto her back, but Romanoff twisted in midair and landed lightly on her feet and one hand. Like a cat, that one. Bucky remembered fighting her, and she’d come closer to taking him down hand to hand than any unEnhanced person had _ever_ managed before. If he hadn’t gotten his right hand up in time to stop her garrotte, she might just have had him before he could catch her with his left arm and wrench her off him.

She was damn near unstoppable, largely because just like Steve, she never gave up...

_“ **Again**.”_

_The single harsh word echoed through the shooting range, and several of the girls whimpered. Pretty much the only ones who didn’t were those who had already passed out, driven far beyond the limits of their endurance._

_Those were his orders. Push them until they broke, every last one._

_These were all the older girls, the ones no more than a few years from graduation. They’d lasted longer than any of the younger groups, already hardened by the training they’d had in the past. Even so, only two were still standing. Both of them were shaking so badly he was surprised they could hold on to their rifles. Neither had come close to hitting the target last round, aim thrown off too badly by exhaustion and pain._

_“You’re doing it until you get a kill shot,” he told them, merciless. “ **Again**.”_

_The blonde obediently tried to lift her gun. He saw the spasm that ripped through her bicep, quite possibly literally tearing the muscle. She cried out and the rifle hit the floor, followed by her body moments later as she fainted._

_That left just one, the redhead. She was the only one who’d even come close to a kill shot, but that was back at the beginning, before the gruelling hours of practice had taken their toll. Tears ran down her face and she’d bitten her lip right through, but the look in her eyes as she stared at him wasn’t the desperation and despair of the others._

_It was hatred, pure and burning like the fire her hair resembled._

_He saw the way she used that hatred, how she let it fuel her determination as she lifted the rifle. She was breathing in sharp gasps as she fought to get the weapon into position. She couldn’t make it to her shoulder, so she fired from her hip instead._

_Glancing down the range, he saw the bullet hole through the target’s heart area. It wasn’t a perfect shot, but it would have gotten the job done on a real target._

_Looking back at her, at the defiance written all over her face, he nodded. “Finally. You’re done for the day.”_

_She dropped the gun and collapsed at last, crying out from the pain as spasms wracked her body. As he watched her, a thought crossed his mind that would get him into far more trouble if his handlers ever found out about it than ending the class before she broke._

_She was beautiful. Almost as beautiful as Her._

“Bucky. Bucky!” Steve’s voice was distant, muffled, like it was coming through layers of wool that cut Bucky off from the rest of reality. He felt disconnected, unreal. The flashbacks could hit him like that, the really intense ones where he got slammed with the memory of a specific incident, and not just a cascade of images and feelings.

Slowly he pulled himself back to the present, using Steve’s tight grip on his arm and insistent repetition of his name to ground himself. When he was confident he wouldn’t slip back into the past again, Bucky nodded and Steve gave a sigh of relief.

“I lost you for a minute there,” Steve said, easing his hold on Bucky’s arm but not letting go entirely. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” The word was barely understandable, more of a rasp, and Bucky coughed to clear his throat. Looking around, he realized Steve had pulled him into the hall outside the training room, and he was now sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, Steve crouched in front of him. “Sorry. Still catches me by surprise, sometimes.”

He hated it when that happened, not least because it left him completely vulnerable until he worked his way free of the flashback. So far it had only been that intense a few times. 

“What set you off? If it was because of Natasha threatening Peggy I’d have expected you to attack, not get lost in your head.” Steve was still watching him in concern.

“No, it wasn’t that.” Bucky frowned, struggling to put into words something he still didn’t really understand himself. It had been such a brief flash, and it didn’t make any sense. “It reminded me of something. Something I did for HYDRA.”

It was the longest single period they’d ever left him out of the ice, because they’d wanted him to be a trainer, not a killer. Even so most of it was just a blur of faces and voices and images, nothing concrete enough for him to focus on. That meant they’d deliberately erased it after he was done - and he thought he recalled that they were angry with him for some reason, at the end. Maybe if he concentrated on it next time he was with Wanda he’d remember more.

They’d been Russian girls, hard as diamonds and just as beautiful, more deadly with their bare hands than most people could be fully armed. That redhead, too stubborn to admit defeat no matter how much pain she was in... was it just that Natasha reminded him of her? The flashback could have been from five years ago or fifty, he had no frame of reference.

Natasha. He’d been thinking of her as Romanoff this whole time, even though she’d made it clear he was welcome to call her by her informal name. Why the change now?

What had the girl’s name been? What had happened to her in the end? He couldn’t remember.

“Are you still up to this?” Steve wanted to know. “I can help you back to your room, if not.”

“No, I want to do this,” Bucky insisted. He pushed himself to his feet, using Steve’s grip on him for added leverage, and was grateful to find he wasn’t too shaky once he was there. “It wasn’t a bad one, it’s not going to trigger me to get violent, I don’t think. I need the exercise.”

“All right, if you’re sure.” Steve let go of his arm, and patted him on the shoulder instead. “Of course, first we have to wait for the ladies to clear out. I think I managed to get you out of there before they noticed us.”

“Oh I get it. You weren’t worried about me, you just didn’t want to lose the pretty view.” Bucky was pleased that he was able to joke about it, and even more pleased when Steve snorted in amusement and elbowed him sharply. He remembered the way they had bantered, before, but most of the time he couldn’t manage it any more.

It felt good. Right. Like coming home at last. Like the way he felt when he took Peggy in his arms.

“Should I be ribbing you about making eyes at Natasha?” Steve laughed. “You were staring pretty hard, there.”

“Only if you want me to get annoyed at you for checking out Peggy,” Bucky retorted without thinking about it.

He cursed the words the moment they were out of his mouth, because they were exactly the wrong thing to say. Steve flinched - it was barely noticeable, the other man was trying hard to hide the reaction, but Bucky knew him too well. 

“Shit, Steve, I’m sorry,” he apologized awkwardly. It hadn’t escaped him, the way Steve would gaze at Peggy with longing when he thought nobody was looking, or the pained expression in his friend’s eyes sometimes when Steve watched Peggy and Bucky together.

“For what? I started it.” Steve was trying to shake it off, play it as another joke. “You know if it really bothers you...”

“The only part that bothers me is that there’s anything to be bothered about in the first place,” Bucky snapped, suddenly impatient with the way they’d all been dancing around it from the start. Peggy had told him that she wasn’t with Steve, that they’d chosen not to be together, but the idea of it had obviously never left either of their thoughts. “You know I wouldn’t fight you if you wanted to take her back, right? She was your girl first, Steve.”

“Neither of us is _taking_ her,” Steve told him with a tight smile. “She’s not a prize, Bucky, and she’d smack both of us six ways from Sunday if she thought we were fighting over her like it was up to us instead of her. She loves you with all her heart, never doubt it.”

“I don’t.” And he didn’t, he really didn’t. He couldn’t, not when she looked at him with her emotions so clear to read in her eyes, not when she held him to her like he was the other half of her soul. “But she still loves you, too.”

“And I love her.” Steve shrugged and sighed. “I also love Natasha, and I’m damned glad I don’t have to choose between them. Yeah, it hurts sometimes. I’ll get over it eventually, and meanwhile I just really don’t want it to mess up our friendship, or your relationship with Peggy.”

It seemed like there should be a better damned solution, but if there was one, Bucky couldn’t come up with it. He’d tried talking to Peggy about it a few times, but she just got flustered and insisted it wasn’t a problem, exactly the way Steve was doing now. He loved them both and he wanted them to be happy, and it killed them that they obviously weren’t.

But it wasn’t like breaking up with Peggy to try to force her back to Steve would make anybody happy, either. She’d be pissed at him for hurting her, Steve would be pissed at him for hurting her, and just to put the icing on the cake, Natasha would probably kick his ass for trying to fuck her over in the process.

“Love shouldn’t be this fucking complicated,” he muttered under his breath. 

He hadn’t meant it to be a joke, but Steve chuckled and punched him in the shoulder. “I’m starting to think if it’s not the most complicated, messy thing in your life, you’re doing it wrong,” Steve told him. “If it’s too easy, that just means you don’t really care enough. Our situation is extra screwed up, so I guess we’re doing something extra right.”

“That’s complete bullshit, so why does it sound like it might actually make sense?” Bucky shook his head. “Just... just _don’t_ let it fuck up our friendship, okay? I need you.” He wasn’t sure if he needed Steve more than Peggy, or Peggy more than Steve, but he knew it would destroy him to have to make the choice either way.

“Seventy years of HYDRA’s best efforts to brainwash you out of existence didn’t manage to end our friendship, Bucky,” Steve said, soft but sincere. “I doubt anything less is going to accomplish it. In a year we’ll be looking back at all this and laughing that it ever felt so hard.”

“Maybe.” Bucky wasn’t as sure of that as Steve seemed to be, but he held on to Steve’s conviction like it was a lifeline. As long as Steve didn’t give up on him - and Steve would _never_ give up on him, he had concrete, tangible evidence of that - they would get through it somehow.

He had to believe that, or he’d drive himself mad.


End file.
